D-Link Wifi

The past few days I’ve been toying with Wifi equipment from D-Link – and access point (DWL-G700AP) and a wireless router (DI-524). These were pretty much the first to wifi-devices, which I’ve completely setup, and configured on my own, so it was an interesting experience.
The first experience was in the weekend, when I tried to get a basic TDC Broadband (DSL) connection made avaiable wirelessly. Not knowing too much about Wifi, I though the Access Point was the thing to get, and the DWL-G700AP seemed to be a fair deal in the local IT-vendor. After spending a few hours trying to get it to work, I gave up and called a friend for some advice.

It turned out, that the problem wasn’t the access point, but the lack of a router in the setup. The Broand Connection was ethernet terminated, and asumed you got an router yourself, if you needed one.

So… online I went and got the DI-524 wireless router – which quite unexpectedly was cheaper than the G700AP Access Point, but had the same basic features. It turned up next day, and I brought a laptop from work (with wifi) home with me, to ease the testing.

It took a few hours, but it works just perfectly. The hours it took weren’t due to the D-Link devices, but more to a failing wifi-card in the laptop. It constantly amazes me how efficiently a corporate it-department can mess-up a perfectly fine piece of hardware. Once I figured the laptop was the issue and switch to my PowerMac (which also have build-in Wifi), all problems disappeared and the D-Link devices were configured and running perfectly in a matter of minutes (the configuration interface is really that simple).

The setup of both the G700AP and the DI-524 are similar and easy use. They support all current security features, and through a web interface, you can even easily configure the signal strength – I set mine to 50% as it seems to be sufficient to cover the area I wanted covered by the wifi.